Linguistics lectures

Two authorities in the field of linguistics will present talks at Fresno State in November.

Scott Farrar of the Universität Bremen will speak on “ Knowledge Engineering and Linguistics” on Nov. 10. Helen Aristar-Dry of Eastern Michigan University and LinguistList will speak on “ Authorship Attribution: A Case Study” on Nov. 11.

Both appearances are sponsored by the College of Arts and Humanities and Associated Students.

Farrar will speak at 4 p.m. in Peters Building room 13. He is conducting post doctoral work at the Universität Bremen researching artificial spatial cognition and ontology. He is also a consultant on a Fresno State-based NSF funded project, “ Data-driven Linguistic Ontology Development” (NSF #0411348, William Lewis, PI).

He received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 2003 from the University of Arizona. His research interests include typology, semantics, ontology, knowledge engineering, spatial cognition and robotics.

Aristar-Dry will speak Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. in Conley Art room 101. She is a professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University, where she teaches courses in corpus analysis, discourse analysis and linguistic stylistics. In addition to text analysis, her interests include digital archiving of linguistic material and the creation of Web-based infrastructure for the discipline of linguistics.

She is a co-moderator (and co-founder) of The LINGUIST List and Principal Investigator of a number of grant projects focused on digital archiving, most notably the E-MELD project (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data, http://emeld.org) and the DATA project ( Dena'ina Archiving, Training, and Access).